On this Galentine's day, I celebrate the ten-year anniversary of this great event in the history of sexuality. komonews.com/news/local/a...

Another headline to rewrite: "Money meant for starving children used to provide security theater escorts for OMB Director."

They are dismissed as hysterical or non-expert or irrationally cautious. Then you wake up one day and Peter Theil and Elon Musk own your water and your attention and your political process. Then the men emerge to tell us what women told us a decade before.

For decades the tech industry has insulated itself from criticism by leveraging the rhetoric of progressivism & benignity towards the disenfranchised & disabled, w promises of “access” & “democratization” that their products afford. We can’t stop them using this lang but we can stop falling for it.

Farage's lies about people not speaking English factchecked here. NB Farage also claimed that "four million speak barely passable English" - this too is a lie. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c1...

🚨WE'RE HIRING AGAIN!🚨 Music @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social Permanent lectureship in historically European music (anywhere in the world) in the long 18C. Must have PhD in hand at application. Deadline 12th March; job talks/interviews 1st & 2nd April for ASAP start. www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/138148-...

Not only did they murder hundreds of thousands of people. They also stole the money.

so about the relationship between the state and capital

I wrote an essay about how it feels to be a historian at this particular point in history everydayorientalism.wordpress.com/2026/02/13/o...

Discworld QOTD, from Wyrd Sisters

Found an additional graphic that gets even more of these quotes together. I've kept "I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees" pinned above my desk since I first started studying evolutionary biology as an undergraduate. So relatable to get extremely frustrated with your study system.

Labour's Manifesto promised to ban conversion therapy. But I defy anyone to explain how, looking at the totality of its policy platform, Labour's real policy is anything other than promoting desistance.

One thing I think the Writers Guild really got right in our last negotiation was asking "Even if the tech doesn't work, how could they use it to pay us less?"

Ireland’s basic income for the arts scheme becomes permanent | Ireland | The Guardian share.google/bh8S11z6TswS...

Generative AI, in nearly every piece of software you try to use these days. #AI #SpeirGorm #GenAI

“If Britain is ever to give up clutching at Uncle Sam’s coattails, it must change its partner for upgrading its nuclear deterrent from America to France, and use that cooperation to present Vladimir Putin with a combined European nuclear deterrent that should keep him honest.”

Maybe take seriously the idea that the people at the levers of implementation will try it even if it's *not actually any good*. www.nobhillgazette.com/arts_and_cul...

£240m. With no tender. Palantir. I wrote to Wes Streeting last week demanding answers. Every day without any transparency deepens the scandal. Palantir out.

At the end of the day, don't we all just want to read books and eat pastries?

U.K. might lose a prime minister because a guy who worked for him knew another guy who hung out with Epstein. Meanwhile the U.S. opposition party is telling our President, who was Epstein's best friend, that his secret police should get better training so their public street murders look less messy.

If you’re into books written by people instead of assembled by AI slop, I just finished this one, which is about a Black guy who quits the CIA to train Black freedom fighters in Chicago, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

“He might be dead, but it sure seems like Jeffrey Epstein won.” That is a sentence.

This is what a humane government looks like - it does not slam the door on people running from war or torture or famine or floods: www.cbc.ca/news/world/s...

Mozilla will allow Firefox users to entirely block current and future generative AI features on the browser after user feedback revealed many who wanted an AI-free browser experience.

Canadian journalist David Cochrane said it best “"America isn't the way it is because he's president. He's president because America is the way it is."

The degree to which both of these people are so completely full of shit, name checking things they have no understanding of, free associating “deep thoughts” & yet so perfectly confident in their half-assed knowledge, helps clarify why the entire elite class is so desperate to get us all on ChatGPT

The way AI affected translators' jobs shows that AI cannot replace humans, only degrade their work. Translators are now hired to edit AI-made translations. Nevermind than editing a bad translation is harder than just translating it well! That still gives the company an excuse to underpay them.

"Industry, for the growing European middle classes, first meant freedom from want—from the real tyrannies of hunger and cold—and then freedom to want. Consumption itself became a kind of liberty." Beautifully about Svalbard and the world by @brdemuth.bsky.social hakaimagazine.com/features/foo...

I always believed the purpose of Brexit was to destroy the ability of nation states to take on spiv capitalism. I never expected to see actual evidence of it.

Tesla driver’s devastating 911 call while stuck in fiery car revealed: ‘Help please … I am going to die’ A 20-year-old Tesla driver pleaded with a 911 operator to save his life as he was trapped in a burning car, according to a wrongful death lawsuit against Tesla filed by his mother on Wednesday.

Kash Patel, a podcaster selected because of his fierce loyalty to the President, told FBI agents not to investigate the details on Renee Good's shooting because it would contradict the President. Fact matter less than the King's opinion in a personalist regime.

Thomas More as a young man. Pre-Holbein. Still pretty intense! Today is his birthday.

This is not true. All of the evidence from videos and eyewitnesses show the booing started when Vance appeared on the jumbotron. An accurate headline would say this: "VANCE BOOED AT MILAN CORTINA OPENING CEREMONY"

As men rant about the dangers of destroying reputations by releasing the Epstein files… Remember that one of Gisele Pelicot’s rapists appealed because he felt the burden of being labeled a “rapist” was too much to bear. He lost. They added to his sentence There’s always hope.

It is 100% true that you have to take time to be good at art, but using AI doesn't make you good at art, either, and so it's a non-answer. And art is one of the single most accessible things for poor people to get good at.

I can't stop thinking about what Bezos has done to the Washington Post. But I also don't know why I & anyone else is shocked. I went undercover in an Amazon 'fulfilment centre' in 2013 and saw first-hand exactly who Bezos is. We have all been SO naive. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

From @acyn.bsky.social (posted on X) "Reporter: Do any of you have a favorite animal? Child: My favorite one is a gold snake that can move. It has gold eyes, and it has a super-duper tail… Reporter: Mr. Mamdani, the second question for you. Mamdani: Yes. It’s also the golden snake."

🚨🚨 "Surprise, surprise". 👇👇

The billionaire class wants to decimate the white collar workforce. Because white collar workers are expensive. And because white collar workers—who historically sided with billionaires—are questioning that alliance. Which makes their knowledge and resources a huge threat to billionaire power.

They tell us we only need STEM education now, and everything the tech bros are doing and saying makes a case for why we actually badly need the humanities.

One of those moments an editor—this editor, at least—dreams of.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Circa 2006: "All of these young tech people are quitting college to start companies with their brilliant ideas! Maybe we don't actually need higher education so much after all. Circa 2026: "Oh, so this is why we actually needed our tech overlords to get a broad humanistic education."

My cartoon in The Oldie

I found a nice review of The Essential Akutagawa today, so I'd like to share here. But first, I don't think I've previously shared this earlier review on the Life She Loves blog. www.lifesheloves.com/my-asian-era...

"The work is the medium by which we learn" YES.

Once again, it turns out “fully autonomous” means “a guy in the Philippines.”

"we cannot begin to talk about freedom and justice in any culture if we are not talking about mass based literacy movements." bell hooks 1997 we cannot begin to talk about freedom+justice in any culture now if we are not talking about mass de-literacy cognitive-incapacitating industries.

I actually just sung out the full four lines in my head.